Google Maps is an interesting feature which most of us have used in some way or other. Either to find the way to a friend's new house or to locate a Pizza joint near our house. It helps and it sure do but what is interesting is to learn how to use this in our Applications to make them more user centric with all other Web 2.0 concepts.
Let me start with giving you some examples, you go to a Bank's website and click on Locate an ATM link. It takes you to a page where you select a state from a drop down (Eeeaaakkhhhh!!!). The selection than loads another drop down below it with the city information (Double Eeeaaakkkkhh!!). You than select your city and the page is refreshed with 50 entries and their address. Now its your job to figure out which one is the nearest one and in most cases you doesn't even know your neighborhood else you would not had to use this service. Now as a Web developer how can you make this easy and interesting for the user. How about using Google Maps for this? Nope I am not kidding you can integrate Google Maps with your application (For FREE!!). Check out Google Maps API it have very interesting example and usage.
To see a live usage you can goto my other blog Varun Smriti Udhyaan. It is a very flexible api completely usable using javascript technology and allows you to be very creative in finding the usage. Check out the examples and demo provided on Google Maps API page.
Be Creative...
